Humanities in Medicine Lecture Series Diabetes and Big Data: Why Medical History Matters for Machine Learning

Beginning in the 1950s, medical researchers sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health began a decades-long project to understand why members of the Gila River Indian Community Reservation, located outside of Phoenix, suffered from disproportionately high rates of diabetes. In this talk, Professor Radin will consider the hidden medical and colonial history of the Pima Indian Diabetes Data Set (PIDD) to offer a new perspective on important debates over open access, compensation, participation and the nature of knowledge made from “big data.”